Reading Group Guide
Plot Summary It was that simple . . . So begins Marya Hornbacher's heart-wrenching account of her through-the-looking-glass love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death. "I look back on my life," she writes, "the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, 'No, no, don't open that door!'" But open that door she does; and we follow her through, into a wonderfully scripted, alarming, all-American story. At the age of five, precociously intelligent and imaginative, Marya returned from a ballet class convinced that she was fat. By age nine she was secretly bulimic. When she was fifteen she pledged allegiance to anorexia, taking great pride in her capacity for self-starvation. The back-and-forth shuttle between bulimia and anorexia continued until she was twenty years old and fifty-two pounds in skeletal weight--through six hospitalizations and one involuntary commitment, endless therapy, the loss of family and friends, countless tests and diagnoses, miscarriages . . . and all the deceptions necessary to maintain her drive to rid herself of her body.
At twenty-three, a recovering Marya Hornbacher ("It's never over. Not really.") looks back into the fun-house mirrors of her first twenty years and gives us a fearless, vivid, compelling reconstruction of what she sees there . . . of who and what she was. She balances the tangle of personal, family, and cultural factors underlying eating disorders with carefully researched findings on bulimia and anorexia. Hornbacher's story is one of a young woman in free fall toward death, told from the perspective of one who has found a way to turn backto life. This landmark book "is an unexpected instant classic that demonstrates how brilliantly told personal stories can still have great impact and value." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Topics for Discussion
1. In an interview with Elle magazine, Hornbacher said, "The book does not end with the end of the eating disorder, it ends with a turning point." How would you describe that "turning point"? What other turning points does the author describe in Wasted, and what were their outcomes?
2. To what extent do you think Hornbacher, at twenty-three, has achieved an understanding of her lifelong problem? Do you think she understands some areas and issues more fully than she does others? Are there any phenomena or implications of her eating disorders that she does not confront or understand?
3. Hornbacher writes that eating disorders are "a response, albeit a rather twisted one, to a culture, a family, a self." What personal (biological and psychological), familial, and cultural roots of anorexia and bulimia emerge from Hornbacher's history of her eighteen-year battle? What phenomena does she single out as being most significant?
4. In what ways does Hornbacher maintain and expand upon her main metaphor of a looking-glass world? What specifics of reversal and inversion give us a sense of an anorexic and bulimic young woman's world?
5. What role do secrecy and deceit play in the progression of eating disorders? How and why are bulimic and anorexic children so adept at concealing their behavior?
6. To what extent are anorexia and bulimia associated with a desire to control one's own self and the behavior of family members and acquaintances? To what extent do they spring from "a desire for power that strips you of all power" and a desire for personal autonomy?
7. Do you think that Hornbacher's frank account of her afflictions and other, similarly honest accounts foster an understanding of eating disorders and prevent other girls and young women from following in her footsteps? Or do they provide eating-disordered people guidance in how to "do it better"?
8. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, seven million girls and women in the United states have eating disorders. Why are anorexia and bulimia so overwhelmingly afflictions of young females? Why do so few young males fall victim to these disorders? Do boys and young men in our society suffer from different but corresponding disorders?
9. How well does Hornbacher combine her personal account with information from doctors, psychologists, and other authorities? Do the two sets of information consistently reinforce one another, or do they ever contradict one another?
10. How do anorexia and bulimia relate to the "cross-addictions" to sex, alcohol, and drugs? Does Hornbacher clarify the links among all these addictions?
11. Is Hornbacher justified in personalizing her disorder, as when she comments "You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you"? To what extent does she view her disorder as a distinct other person or as a second self of Marya Hornbacher?
12. What physical and emotional scars does Hornbacher carry by the end of her account? What do those scars indicate about the nature and severity of her ordeal? What does her attitude toward them indicate about her ability to vanquish her disorder? Do you think that she will succeed in overcoming her "fascination with death"?
13. In what ways does Hornbacher present eating disorders as involving a conflict between "the female body" and "the female mind"? What is the nature of that conflict, and how does it manifest itself in anorexia and/or bulimia?
14. "People who've Been to Hell and Back," Hornbacher writes (p. 131), "develop a certain sort of self-righteousness." What sort of self-righteousness does she mean? How is it displayed by her former self? Does her book display any kind of self-righteousness?
15. Near the end of the book, Hornbacher writes, "I want to write a prescription for culture, . . . and I can't do that." (p. 283) To what extent, however, is her book a prescription for our present culture? What would be your "prescription for culture"?
About the Author:
Marya Hornbacher works as a freelance editor and writer and maintains her day-to-day battle with her eating disorders. She is the winner of the White Award for Best Feature Story of 1993, for her Minneapolis Star Tribune article, "Wasted," and has received the Women of Inspiration Award from the American Anorexia Bulimia Association. After a relapse in 1994, after completing Wasted, she resumed her leap-of-faith battle. "It's exhausting," as she writes in Wasted, "but it is a fight I believe in." She currently lives in California.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Childhood 1974-1982"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."
"I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry.
"You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying," Tweedledee remarked: "there's nothing to cry about."
"If I wasn't real," Alice said--half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous--"I shouldn't be able to cry."
"I hope you don't think those are real tears?" Tweedledee interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
It was that simple: One minute I was your average nine-year-old, shorts and a T-shirt and long brown braids, sitting in the yellow kitchen, watching Brady Bunch reruns, munching on a bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot. The next minute I was walking, in a surreal haze I would later compare to the hum induced by speed, out of the kitchen, down the stairs, into the bathroom, shutting the door, putting the toilet seat up, pulling my braids back with one hand, sticking my first two fingers down my throat, and throwing up until I spat blood.
Flushing the toilet, washing my hands and face, smoothing my hair, walking back up the stairs of the sunny, empty house, sitting down in front of the television, picking up my bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot.
How did your eating disorder start? the therapists ask years later, watching me pick at my nails, curled up in a ball in an endless series of leather chairs. I shrug. Hell if I know, I say.
I just wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, ofcourse, killed the cat.
It wouldn't hit me, what I'd done, until the next day in school. I would be in the lunchroom of Concord Elementary, Edina, Minnesota, sitting among my prepubescent, gangly friends, hunched over painful nubs of breasts and staring at my lunch tray. I would realize that, having done it once, I'd have to keep doing it. I would panic. My head would throb, my heart do a little arrhythmic dance, my newly imbalanced chemistry making it seem as though the walls were tilting, the floor undulating beneath my penny-loafered feet. I'd push my tray away. Not hungry, I'd say. I did not say: I'd rather starve than spit blood.
And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.
I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.
Liar. She never let me go. And I've never quite been able to wriggle my way free.
California
Five years old. Gina Lucarelli and I are standing in my parents' kitchen, heads level with the countertops, searching for something to eat. Gina says, You guys don't have any normal food. I say apologetically, I know. My parents are weird about food. She asks, Do you have any chips? No. Cookies? No. We stand together, staring into the refrigerator. I announce, We have peanut butter. She pulls it out, sticks a grimy finger into it, licks it off. It's weird, she says. I know, I say. It's unsalted. She makes a face, says, Ick. I agree. We stare into the abyss of food that falls into two categories: Healthy Things and Things We Are Too Short to Cook--carrots, eggs, bread, nasty peanut butter, alfalfa sprouts, cucumbers, a six-pack of Diet Lipton Iced Tea in blue cans with a little yellow lemon above the word Tea. Tab in the pink can. I offer, We could have toast. She peers at the bread and declares, It's brown. We put the bread back. I say, inspired, We have cereal! We go to the cupboard, the one by the floor. We stare at the cereal. She says, It's weird. I say, I know. I pull out a box, look at the nutritional information, run my finger down the side and authoritatively note, It only has five grams of sugar in it. I stick my chin up and brag, We don't eat sugar cereals. They make you fat. Gina, competitive, says, I wouldn't even eat that. I wouldn't eat anything with more than two grams of sugar. I say, Me neither, put the cereal back, as if it's contaminated. I bounce up from the floor, stick my tongue out at Gina. I'm on a diet, I say. Me too, she says, face screwing up in a scowl. Nuh-uh, I say. Uh-huh, she retorts. I turn my back and say, Well, I wasn't hungry anyway. Me neither, she says. I go to the fridge, make a show of taking out a Diet Lipton Iced Tea with Little Yellow Lemon, pop it open, sip loudly, tttthhhpppttt. It tastes like sawdust, dries out my mouth. See? I say, pointing to Diet, I'm gonna be as thin as my mom when I grow up.
I think of Gina's mom, who I know for a fact buys sugar cereal. I know because every time I sleep over there we have Froot Loops for breakfast, the artificial colors turning the milk red. Gina and I suck it up with straws, seeing who can be louder.
Your mom, I say out of pure spite, is fat.
Gina says, At least my mom knows how to cook.
At least my mom has a job, I shout.
At least my mom is nice, she sneers.
Read a Sample Chapter
Wasted
A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
By Marya Hornbacher Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
Copyright ©1999 Marya Hornbacher
All right reserved. ISBN: 0606182020
Childhood 1974-1982"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."
"I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry.
"You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying," Tweedledee remarked: "there's nothing to cry about."
"If I wasn't real," Alice said--half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous--"I shouldn't be able to cry."
"I hope you don't think those are real tears?" Tweedledee interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
It was that simple: One minute I was your average nine-year-old, shorts and a T-shirt and long brown braids, sitting in the yellow kitchen, watching Brady Bunch reruns, munching on a bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot. The next minute I was walking, in a surreal haze I would later compare to the hum induced by speed, out of the kitchen, down the stairs, into the bathroom, shutting the door, putting the toilet seat up, pulling my braids back with one hand, sticking my first two fingers down my throat, and throwing up until I spat blood.
Flushing the toilet, washing my hands andface, smoothing my hair, walking back up the stairs of the sunny, empty house, sitting down in front of the television, picking up my bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot.
How did your eating disorder start? the therapists ask years later, watching me pick at my nails, curled up in a ball in an endless series of leather chairs. I shrug. Hell if I know, I say.
I just wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, of course, killed the cat.
It wouldn't hit me, what I'd done, until the next day in school. I would be in the lunchroom of Concord Elementary, Edina, Minnesota, sitting among my prepubescent, gangly friends, hunched over painful nubs of breasts and staring at my lunch tray. I would realize that, having done it once, I'd have to keep doing it. I would panic. My head would throb, my heart do a little arrhythmic dance, my newly imbalanced chemistry making it seem as though the walls were tilting, the floor undulating beneath my penny-loafered feet. I'd push my tray away. Not hungry, I'd say. I did not say: I'd rather starve than spit blood.
And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.
I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.
Liar. She never let me go. And I've never quite been able to wriggle my way free.
California
Five years old. Gina Lucarelli and I are standing in my parents' kitchen, heads level with the countertops, searching for something to eat. Gina says, You guys don't have any normal food. I say apologetically, I know. My parents are weird about food. She asks, Do you have any chips? No. Cookies? No. We stand together, staring into the refrigerator. I announce, We have peanut butter. She pulls it out, sticks a grimy finger into it, licks it off. It's weird, she says. I know, I say. It's unsalted. She makes a face, says, Ick. I agree. We stare into the abyss of food that falls into two categories: Healthy Things and Things We Are Too Short to Cook--carrots, eggs, bread, nasty peanut butter, alfalfa sprouts, cucumbers, a six-pack of Diet Lipton Iced Tea in blue cans with a little yellow lemon above the word Tea. Tab in the pink can. I offer, We could have toast. She peers at the bread and declares, It's brown. We put the bread back. I say, inspired, We have cereal! We go to the cupboard, the one by the floor. We stare at the cereal. She says, It's weird. I say, I know. I pull out a box, look at the nutritional information, run my finger down the side and authoritatively note, It only has five grams of sugar in it. I stick my chin up and brag, We don't eat sugar cereals. They make you fat. Gina, competitive, says, I wouldn't even eat that. I wouldn't eat anything with more than two grams of sugar. I say, Me neither, put the cereal back, as if it's contaminated. I bounce up from the floor, stick my tongue out at Gina. I'm on a diet, I say. Me too, she says, face screwing up in a scowl. Nuh-uh, I say. Uh-huh, she retorts. I turn my back and say, Well, I wasn't hungry anyway. Me neither, she says. I go to the fridge, make a show of taking out a Diet Lipton Iced Tea with Little Yellow Lemon, pop it open, sip loudly, tttthhhpppttt. It tastes like sawdust, dries out my mouth. See? I say, pointing to Diet, I'm gonna be as thin as my mom when I grow up.
I think of Gina's mom, who I know for a fact buys sugar cereal. I know because every time I sleep over there we have Froot Loops for breakfast, the artificial colors turning the milk red. Gina and I suck it up with straws, seeing who can be louder.
Your mom, I say out of pure spite, is fat.
Gina says, At least my mom knows how to cook.
At least my mom has a job, I shout.
At least my mom is nice, she sneers.
Continues...
Excerpted from Wasted by Marya Hornbacher Copyright ©1999 by Marya Hornbacher. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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